Business of Science and Technology Initiative

Browse by

The Business of Science and Technology Initiative (BSTI) was established in 2006 between the College of Engineering and the Business School at Cornell University to create a new platform and business growth model for connecting the world-wide corporate community with major research universities. BSTI's objective is to "Innovate the Innovation Process" by facilitating the development and deployment of new technologies in application rich markets.

Unlike traditional "sponsored research" projects, all BSTI efforts are tailored to real-world innovation with corporate involvement in today's open innovation environment. The BSTI accomplishes both innovation and educational goals by forming innovation teams composed of engineering and business students, as well as professors and PhD students. Each team is lead by a BSTI innovation manager with experience in both technical and business innovation. Working in a pre-seed company mode, the interdisciplinary team iterates between uncertain markets and uncertain technology, delivering information and/or prototypes of interest to the corporations. A typical corporate project develops strategic outlooks in areas that are beyond the immediate investment horizon for a corporation but critical to the corporation's innovation and growth plans. A BSTI project iterates between engineering inventions, embodiments, manufacturing evaluations and market opportunity assessments.

A new method for starting the iterative innovation process from the market side based on a sociological trend has been developed. It eliminates the traditional difference between the innovators and the sociological group ...